Candice Malan and Hamish Marshall discuss the results of the 2019 election and look ahead to the next election, which will be held on Oct. 19, 2021. They also look at the final election results and debate the final outcome of the campaign.
00:04:45.480The Liberals successfully picked up Fredericton.
00:04:48.460That was the seat the Greens had won last time.
00:04:50.560The Green MP, Jenica Atwin, had crossed to the Liberals.
00:04:54.160It ended up being a very, very closer race.
00:04:56.740The Greens were far, far behind, and the Conservatives actually did quite well.
00:05:00.220But the Liberals still managed to hang on to it, winning there.
00:05:03.620They didn't make the gains in the West.
00:05:07.500They broadly expect her in British Columbia.
00:05:09.300There was a bunch of seats in British Columbia they had targeted.
00:05:12.240But they picked up Cloverdale, Langley City as sort of their one pickup in BC.
00:05:17.920In Alberta, they picked up Calgary Skyview and Edmonton Centre.
00:05:28.000And then in Ontario, they picked up Aurora, Oak Ridges, Richmond Hill, which were all on the list.
00:05:34.380But there's a lot of other seats that they didn't win.
00:05:37.440And, you know, a seat like Charleswood, St. James, and Sineboya, that was certainly on their list in the Winnipeg area, went down to a recount.
00:05:45.180The Conservatives were ahead by only 24 votes before the recount.
00:05:48.480After the recount, the Conservatives won by, I think, about 400.
00:05:54.320And the Liberals, you know, they picked up a few of their targets, but not very many, and left a lot of seats on the table.
00:05:59.660And what's interesting is that in a lot of areas, the biggest change was that incumbents did better.
00:06:05.320So if you look at the seats that the Liberals tried to pick up off the block, or even the ones that tried to pick up off the Conservatives, you know, a good example is West Nova in Nova Scotia, where the Conservatives in 2019 won by about less than 3%.
00:06:16.640You know, the Conservatives won by a much, much larger margin this time.
00:06:20.880We saw incumbents, the incumbents that survived, generally won with much larger margins, especially non-Liberal incumbents.
00:06:27.320So, you know, the Liberals, they picked up a few of their seats, but they also lost some on the other side.
00:06:32.600So they ended up in a situation where they were still plus 2.
00:06:36.520So you had 12 Tory targets, and these were 12 Liberal-held seats that you thought that the Conservatives would have to win to make the gains.
00:06:44.720I know that one of them in here, Peter Burrow-Kortha, the former Member of Parliament, Miriam Monsef, and the former Cabinet Minister, she lost.
00:06:53.320Were there any other seats in this list that went to the Conservatives?
00:06:57.380I know they didn't do very well in the 905, they wouldn't have won seats like the one in Richmond Hill or King Vaughan, but were there any other upsets?
00:07:06.820No, the Conservatives did win King Vaughan.
00:07:09.420Yeah. So, you know, in the 905, the Conservatives lost two seats, Markham Unionville and Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, but they picked up the Kin Vaughan seats, so for a net of minus one.
00:07:21.340On this list, they picked up Miramichi Grand Lake by a decent margin, but not perhaps as much as they would have liked.
00:07:28.840They picked up Peter Burrow-Kortha, defeating Camden Minister Miriam Monsef, as you correctly pointed out.
00:07:34.560They also won Bonavista, no, sorry, they won a different seat in rural Newfoundland.
00:07:39.900Bonavista-Burin, Trinity was reasonably close, but they won another seat in central Newfoundland, Costa Bay's central Nautsla Dam.
00:07:50.180So they won some seats like that, but, you know, on the whole, they're net down minus two, mainly because of losses between Alberta and B.C., the Conservatives lost seven seats.
00:08:03.400So the seats that they did pick up in Atlantic Canada, the four seats they picked up in Atlantic Canada were not enough to overcome those losses, which is why they ended up down minus two.
00:08:20.860So one of the interesting takeaways is how the Conservatives just didn't really make the inroads that they were looking in suburban parts of the country, so mostly the 905, as well as Vancouver.
00:08:32.140They didn't pick up seats in Vancouver, they actually shed some.
00:08:35.420So what happened and why did that, why did they lose those seats?
00:08:40.240Well, I mean, look, the Conservatives lost across the 905, they lost 50,000 votes.
00:08:43.800They didn't get the votes out that they did last time, which certainly would have helped in a bunch of those seats.
00:08:47.940But one of the things that unites a lot of the seats that they didn't win, other ones that they lost, or the ones they'd hoped to have win didn't, is a significant Chinese population, Chinese Canadian population.
00:08:59.040So we saw the Conservatives losing Richmond, Steveston Richmond East, Markham Unionville in Ontario, and also seats like Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, which has a little bit of, has some Chinese Canadian population,
00:09:16.440and Richmond Hill, which was a seat which was very close in the last election, was not as close this time.
00:09:23.860You know, the Chinese Canadian population had been, for the last decade, big supporters of the Conservative Party.
00:09:29.500The Conservatives done very, very well with that group of Canadians.
00:09:32.620And we saw a significant, significant drop this time, which hurt the Conservatives, both in the Lower Mainland and in the 905.
00:09:41.120One of the stories that came out, I know that Aaron O'Toole sort of took a firm on China stance and was talking a little bit about how China deals unfairly on the world stage,
00:09:52.840their human rights abuses, their trade abuses.
00:09:55.260And he was sort of presenting himself as a tough on China type guy.
00:09:58.460And Trudeau sort of twisted that and accused him of stoking anti-Chinese bigotry and hatred.
00:10:05.980And then we saw a story about WeChat, the Chinese social networking texting app.
00:10:13.060Basically, there was some kind, I don't know if it's verified or not, but there was some kind of a campaign run from Beijing to encourage Chinese Canadians not to vote for the Conservatives.
00:10:24.020So can you tell us a little bit more about that? And do you think that that had an impact?
00:10:28.480Well, there was an entirely parallel, just as campaigns have evolved on English-speaking social networks like Facebook,
00:10:36.440there was an entirely different parallel campaign being fought strongly and viciously and with great intensity on WeChat in Chinese.
00:10:45.760And there's a lot of accusations and it's really no holds barred politics on that app.
00:10:55.940You know, there's been allegations that a lot of the anti-conservative messages came from, you know, accounts associated with the Chinese government.
00:11:06.920I obviously am not an expert in these things. I don't know which accounts these things came from, but it certainly seemed that there was a coordinated and concerted attack on the Conservatives on WeChat,
00:11:18.120which I think had a big, big impact in Chinese Canadian communities. And we saw that in the results.
00:11:23.420It's interesting because when the Americans thought that there was Russian interference in their election in 2016, it led to like a huge, you know, overwhelming campaign movement, media campaign.
00:11:36.920You know, it's all we heard about for years after the 2016 U.S. campaign.
00:11:42.440Here we have another adversarial government, probably perhaps worse than the Russians.
00:11:47.200I'm talking about the Chinese in Beijing, potentially interfering with our election, potentially, you know, really swaying these few key ridings.
00:11:57.020And we're not hearing much about it. That's disappointing.
00:11:59.800I want to, you know, I think that, you know, I can say from, you know, my experience in the last election that in the last election, the Canadian Security Services had set up a group to brief the parties on attempts at foreign interference to representatives of the RCMP and CSIS there.
00:12:18.340You know, I certainly hope that the Conservative campaign is bringing these concerns to that group to see if they can get action.
00:12:26.840And, you know, obviously it's all covered by, you know, official secrets rules and things now.
00:12:32.040And I don't have insight on what's happened so far, but I really, really hope that someone has initiated some of those things you're talking about.
00:12:40.280Yeah, same here. I want to move on, Hamish, and talk a little bit about the People's Party and the sort of vote splitting.
00:12:46.820I know we talked about this throughout the campaign, that the People's Party wasn't just made up of the sort of libertarian wing of the Conservative Party who felt disillusioned and left,
00:12:56.020that Maxime Bernier's anti-lockdown message was really resonating across the political spectrum,
00:13:01.000especially with people who are already kind of open to voting for protest parties, people who might be more on the left.
00:13:07.200I shared this nifty little graph on Twitter that basically, even if you were to take all of the PPC's votes, I think they got about 840,000,
00:13:17.340if you were to take all of those, give them to Conservatives, just assume that those would have been Conservative voters.
00:13:22.620Otherwise, if Aaron O'Toole had tried to appeal to libertarians in his campaign, even if that were the case,
00:13:28.440the popular vote for the Conservatives would have gone up to 39%, but they would have only gotten 142 seats.
00:13:34.020And the Liberals, the Liberals would have lost, I think, something like 16 seats.
00:13:37.660So the difference, the Conservatives lost 23 seats roughly because of the votes that went over to the PPC.
00:13:45.080Again, if you're assuming that they're all Conservative voters, 16 of those seats went to the Liberals.
00:13:49.820So even if that was reversed, the Conservative vote would have gone up to 142.
00:13:53.820The Liberal vote would have stayed at 143 of the seats once.
00:13:57.640So it wouldn't have made the difference.
00:14:00.300It would have been really interesting, but the PPC vote was not the determining factor in the election.
00:14:06.980Can you offer some insight or help us understand this a little further?
00:14:11.320Yeah, I mean, the Liberal vote has become extraordinarily efficient.
00:14:16.780And I imagine if we looked at those results that some of the ones that the Liberals won by would have been winning by dozens or hundreds of votes.
00:14:24.920You know, we would see the Liberals win a lot of seats by very little and Conservatives win a lot of seats by an awful lot.
00:14:32.340And so we're in a situation where, you know, that Liberal vote has become very, very efficient, especially in Ontario.
00:14:41.440But it speaks to a Conservative need to really break through in the 905.
00:14:47.000We can't, you know, Conservatives can't be hoping just to add an extra percent here or percent there.
00:14:52.560You know, if Conservatives want to win, you know, the 20-odd seats in the 905, which is what they need to do in order to win government, they should be able to, they need to be winning these seats cleanly, as Harper did in 2011, as Doug Ford did in 2018.
00:15:10.200And as, you know, Mike Harris did historically in the late 90s.
00:15:15.300So the Conservatives need to win these seats by a lot.
00:15:18.360There's a lot more work to do in terms of figuring out what needs to do to get more votes out.
00:15:23.680But they have to start from the point that the number of votes we got in the 905 in 2021 was, you know, Conservatives lost 50,000 votes.
00:15:36.520Especially given the strategy of the campaign there.
00:15:39.320A lot of people are now talking, Hamish, about the need for electoral reform, just given that the popular vote is so lopsided with the seat count.
00:15:48.920And, you know, if you look at, there's been a graph circulating on social media showing the percentage of the popular vote that the Prime Minister has gotten.
00:15:57.460You said that the Trudeau Liberals have gotten increasingly, you know, concise in how they campaign.
00:16:03.980But that's not necessarily good for the country, given that they're not winning the majority or even the plurality.
00:16:10.140I know this is sort of not necessarily your area of expertise, but what do you think of the idea of electoral reform and proportional representation here in Canada?
00:16:18.300Look, I think that I traditionally have not been a big fan of electoral reform, but I'm a sort of a traditionalist conservative sort of fellow.
00:16:29.560But I think I think you could see Canada moving towards a system similar to what they have in Germany and New Zealand, a hybrid system where somewhere between a half and two thirds of the MPs are still elected in constituencies like we have right now.
00:16:42.700And then there's a group of MPs that are elected elected from a list, which would make the overall result more proportional, maybe not strictly proportional, more proportional.
00:16:53.240I think ending up in a system like that with something would would be I don't think that's inconceivable in Canada.
00:16:59.400I just don't think it's in anyone's interest.
00:17:00.960You know, the liberals aren't interested in that kind of a change.
00:17:05.920The conservatives are doing well, would do well of it now, but never would have had a majority government.
00:17:12.760So I don't I don't I don't I'm not holding my breath.
00:17:17.500I'm not I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I could be persuaded that it is.
00:17:20.700But I don't think it's going to happen in in a very, very, very long time in this country.
00:17:26.340Well, especially because, I mean, Trudeau was once a proponent of it.
00:17:30.260He once campaigned on it and promised that the 2015 election would be the last election ever determined by the first pass to post system.
00:17:36.760But then he won a majority in that government and in that election and realized that, hey, this voting system isn't all that bad if I can win a majority.
00:17:43.920So surprise, surprise, a politician doing something in their own self-interest.
00:17:48.000Hamish, thank you so much for joining us and for providing insight.
00:17:51.720Thank you for joining us throughout the election campaign.
00:17:54.240You really helped add a lot of insight and color to the election, helping us understand what was going on out there.